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Storm Sirens’ Last Wail

High tide hits Cape Meares in Tillamook County, Ore., where tsunami-warning sirens will be turned off on Jan. 1.Credit
Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

TILLAMOOK, Ore. — The tsunami sirens of Tillamook County, posted along the rocky beachfront on this stretch of the earthquake-prone Pacific coast, are a reassuring presence to many residents and visitors. The 30-odd pole-mounted speakers, simple and dated in their 1960s technology of transistors and circuit boards, carry an echo of cold war civil defense, suggesting that people have a kind of handle on responding to the earth’s potential violence from a killer wave.

But now a decision by the County Commission to dismantle and forever silence the sirens on Jan. 1 has opened up a fault line of its own, as questions of hard science and geology — about the big quake that scientists say will surely strike here one day — mix with emotion and angst about how human beings and emergency managers prepare for, or deny, that eventuality.

What further complicates the story is money. In a hard-pressed county that is still struggling in the aftermath of the recession and tax-revenue declines, managers said they weighed the effectiveness of the sirens, in light of new tsunami research and coastal flood-zone maps, against the roughly $100,000 needed to replace the devices under new federal communications regulations that take effect next year. The conclusion, they said, was clear: the sirens were not worth it.

“In better days, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to spend $100,000 on a less than perfect tool,” said Michael Soots, the county’s director of information services. “But in these times we don’t have the $100,000, and it is much less than perfect.”

Some residents are not buying it. They say they fear that the county’s new tools of warning, which include cellphone texts and automated reverse 911 calls, could leave behind older residents who have not embraced the digital age, along with tourists and day-trippers from Portland who come here to unplug from their smartphones. Wearing a belt and suspenders, those critics charge, should be the rule. If you have three tools in your toolbox, why not have them all at the ready, just in case?

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An Oregon county says it is not worth spending $100,000 to upgrade the sirens, and now uses text messages and phone calls. Some residents disagree.Credit
Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

“Their systems are good, but so are the sirens, and the sirens are already here,” said Ocie Johnson, who lives two blocks from the ocean in the town of Rockaway Beach and who started, with her mother, a Facebook page, “SOS Save our Sirens in Tillamook County.” “They trained us, ‘Listen for the sirens, listen for the sirens,’ ” she said.

Supporters of the county’s decision, including some coastal hazard experts, say that the sirens, comforting as they may sound in their monthly tests, are so vague in their wailing message — declaring only a tsunami in approach, with no indication of size or timing — that they may be, in a strange way, dangerous to public safety.

The last time the sirens wailed, after the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, for example, which triggered tsunami alerts around much of the Pacific Rim, emergency managers here expected the tsunami hitting this part of Oregon to be small, which it was. The only evacuations they ordered were for residents living within a half mile of the shoreline.

But some people panicked anyway, as word of mouth flashed through the community and images from Japan filled the news, and at least a few residents fled. County managers said they drew a message from the experience that a more finely tuned, information-rich alert system would be an improvement over their current tools, including the sirens.

Worse, hazard experts say, the sirens can create a false sense of security from the real threats that hang over the coast. When the next big local earthquake does strike along the 700-mile-long Cascadia Fault, about 60 miles offshore from here — the fault has moved, sometimes catastrophically, about every 300 years, most recently in the late 1700s — residents will have perhaps 15 minutes or so to get to high ground. So by the time the alarm could be sounded on the beach, it would probably be too late anyway. The shaking itself, quake experts say, will be the signal to flee.

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The sirens, bought used in 1993, rely on 1960s technology, but many people like their familiarity.Credit
Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

“I think there is this sort of fetishism with technology that people have — that if only we possessed the accurate technology, we are therefore safe from harm,” said Patrick Corcoran, a hazards specialist at Oregon Sea Grant, a network of researchers and marine experts based at Oregon State University. Mr. Corcoran said that education — about escape routes, planning and contingencies — is what would save lives in a big tsunami, not a screaming noise from the beach.

In a minor tsunami threat, he said, “sirens scare people and suggest a level of danger far greater than reality.” And in a major event, he added, where people really need to run for their lives, power, and probably the siren poles themselves, would probably go down anyway.

“Do you really need a siren to tell you that you just experienced a 9.0 earthquake?” he said.

And there is no debate that the sirens, which were bought used from an old nuclear power plant that closed in 1993, are basically museum pieces. “You can’t get parts, you can’t get people to fix them, and they don’t really serve a purpose anymore,” said Gordon McCraw, the county’s director of emergency management.

What the sirens are, though, without doubt, is familiar.

“There are a lot of older people in this area,” said Pepi Gabor, a co-owner of the Rising Star Cafe along the coast in Wheeler. Ms. Gabor said that while she thought the beach sirens would be “pretty ineffectual” in an actual emergency, they probably prompt memories of security and authority in people who remember the fallout shelters of the 1960s or the air-raid warnings of World War II.

To worry or not — that is the question. Just around the corner from Ms. Gabor’s restaurant, for instance, the Tsunami Bar and Grill was closed on a recent weekday. Had the owners sought a safer locale, free from the threat of earthquake and waves?

Not at all. A sign on the front window said the Tsunami had moved closer to the ocean, to be right on the waterfront.

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2012, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Storm Sirens’ Last Wail. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe